In recent years there has been an explosion in the number of services available over the World Wide Web on the public internet (generally referred to as the “web”), the web being composed of a myriad of pages linked together by hyperlinks and delivered by servers on request using the HTTP protocol. Each page comprises content marked up with tags to enable the receiving application (typically a GUI browser) to render the page content in the manner intended by the page author; the markup language used for standard web pages is HTML (HyperText Markup Language).
However, today far more people have access to a telephone than have access to a computer with an Internet connection. Sales of cellphones are outstripping PC sales so that many people have already or soon will have a phone within reach where ever they go. As a result, there is increasing interest in being able to access web-based services from phones. ‘Voice Browsers’ offer the promise of allowing everyone to access web-based services from any phone, making it practical to access the Web any time and any where, whether at home, on the move, or at work.
Indeed, because many items around the home and office have a sound capability, it is attractive to use sound, not only for passing information to/from/between humans, but also for passing functional information such as URLS, to and between items of equipment. JP 11-119974 (Sony) describes various ways of using sound URLs, these being DTMF sound sequences that decode to character URLs.
A disadvantage of audible sound URLs is that they are generally highly unattractive to humans as they posses a fairly random structure of sound (or so it appears to the human ear). Whilst it is possible to hide sound data such as URLs in other, pleasanter sounds using sound watermarking techniques, this generally requires complex embedding and retrieval systems which is expensive.
It is an object of the present invention to provide improved sound URLs and methods for their usage.